Researchers at The University of Manchester are striving to discover how the body's natural sugars can be used to create stem cell therapys for heart disease and nerve damage thanks to a 370,000 funding boost. All cells that make up the tissues of the body such as skin, liver, brain and blood are surrounded by a layer of sugars that coat the cells........

Proven combinations of medicines and the introduction of new anti-arthritis drugs have significantly improved the therapy of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), as per guidelines issued by the American College of Rheumatology and co-authored by physicians at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Lead author Kenneth Saag, M.D., M.Sc., a professor in the UAB Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology, said the new guidelines update strategies for treating RA with the goal of preventing joint damage and disability........

Eventhough a growing body of research supports a link between effective communication and patient, family and doctor satisfaction, doctors, including oncologists and other specialists who frequently care for terminal patients, do not routinely receive training in end-of-life conversations during medical school, residency training, or after they start to practice medicine........

Masha is a dental patient. Her oral health problems continue to change as she meets new Case Western Reserve University student dentists in Second Life's virtual dental office. The middle-aged avatar is an integral part of a new research project of the Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine and the College of Arts and Sciences department of communication sciences to teach and give students practice time to communicate with mock patients........

New research into the earliest events occurring immediately upon infection with HIV-I shows that the virus deals a stunning blow to the immune system earlier than was previously understood. As per researchers at Duke University Medical Center, this suggests the window of opportunity for successful intervention may be only a matter of days not weeks after transmission, as scientists had previously believed........

Standards in stem cell research help both researchers and regulators to manage uncertainty and the unknown, as per new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Efforts to standardise practices across different labs is, however, a balancing act where the autonomy of researchers and fragility of living material need to be weighed against the need for comparable data........

Logic says it has to be the niche. As air and water preceded life, so the niche, that hospitable environment that shelters adult stem cells in a number of tissues and provides factors necessary to keep them young and vital, must have emerged before its stem cell dependents. A team of researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies led by Leanne Jones, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Laboratory of Genetics, now suggests that this is not always the case. They report in the July 20 advance online edition of the journal Nature that the cells that comprise a specialized niche in the testis of fruit flies actually emerge from adult stem cells, a finding with implications for regenerative medicine, aging research, and cancer therapeutics........

Giving children preventive antibiotics within one hour before they undergo spinal surgery greatly reduces the risk for serious infections after the surgery, suggests a Johns Hopkins study would be reported in the recent issue of Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal (also available online ahead of print). Children who received antibiotics outside of the golden one-hour window were three and half times more likely to develop serious infections at the surgery site, scientists report, pointing out that something as simple as ensuring that a child gets timely prophylaxis can prevent serious complications and reduce the length of hospital stay........

A genetic variation which evolved to protect people of African descent against malaria has now been shown to increase their susceptibility to HIV infection by up to 40 per cent, as per new research. On the other hand, the same variation also appears to prolong survival of those infected with HIV by approximately two years........

Are feelings of depression overwhelming you? Is your self-esteem an issue? Having problems advancing in life or your career? Maybe you feel nervous or self conscious in social settings? Do you avoid social settings all together? Check your smile; tooth loss could be the culprit and you're not alone. Nearly 20 million teeth are extracted each year leaving scores of people to deal with the psychological affects of a less than perfect smile. However, during the Academy of General Dentistry's (AGD) 56th Annual Meeting and Exhibits in Orlando, Fla., July 16-20, H. Asuman Kiyak, PhD, will address the psychological issues affecting people who must deal with the loss of a tooth, as well as explain how this loss can affect the quality of life........

Some parents of children with autism evaluate facial expressions differently than the rest of us--and in a way that is strikingly similar to autistic patients themselves, as per new research by neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs of the California Institute of Technology and psychiatry expert Joe Piven at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill........

Research involving large Middle Eastern families, sophisticated genetic analysis and groundbreaking neuroscience has implicated a half-dozen new genes in autism. More importantly, it strongly supports the emerging idea that autism stems from disruptions in the brain's ability to form new connections in response to experience consistent with autism's onset during the first year of life, when a number of of these connections are normally made........

A new University of Michigan study in mice suggests that a drug recently approved to fight cancer tumors is also able to reduce the effects of graft-versus-host disease, a common and sometimes fatal complication for people who have had bone marrow transplants. Plans are under way at U-M for an initial trial of the drug in people as a new way to prevent graft-versus-host disease. Scientists expect to begin a trial within a year........

More frequent hemodialysis sessions might improve the health of patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), but under reasonable assumptions of expected benefit, the overall costs are likely to increase, as per a research studyappearing in the September 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The findings indicate that strategies are needed to reduce the costs of delivering hemodialysis if patients receive hemodialysis more than three times a week........

A protein found in immune cells may be a reliable marker for schizophrenia risk, report scientists in a new proteomics study appearing in the recent issue of Molecular and Cellular proteomics. Schizophrenia is a severe and complex psychiatric illness that affects about 1% of the population. Diagnosis currently relies on subjective clinical interviews and the assessment of ambiguous symptoms, which frequently leads to delayed diagnosis and therapy. As such, biomarkers that would indicate schizophrenia risk or onset would be extremely useful........